Gordon Willis

Legend has it that when Francis Ford Coppola screened a rough cut of The Godfather to the film's executives, they had a conniption. The movie was too dark. You couldn't see anything. They gave him money for lights. What did he do with it? Luckily, he stuck to his guns and Gordon Willis changed the look of movies in Hollywood forever.
The rich, bloody hues of the Godfather Trilogy, the crisp, romantic beauty of Woody Allen's black and white New York in Manhattan and Broadway Danny Rose. The seedy chic of Klute. The light and shadows in these movies are like another character.
One of the reasons why Woody Allen's best movies are works of art and not just funny comedies is that he was smart enough to hire Willis.
Now is as good a time as any to enjoy the gorgeous, richly expressive wonders of his breathtaking work.

Stardust Memories. Woody Allen.

The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppola.

 

Manhattan. Woody Allen.

Klute. Alan J. Pakula.

The Godfather II. Francis Ford Coppola.

Broadway Danny Rose. Woody Allen.

Ida

This review contains spoilers.

An emotionally devastating film set in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland, this intimate movie directed by Pawel Pawlikowski and co-written with Rebecca Lenkiewicz, is about Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska), a young Catholic novice who, right before she is to take her vows, learns that she is actually a Jew who was left at the doors of a convent after her parents were murdered during the war.

Ida learns the truth from her aunt and sole surviving relative, Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a hard charging judge in the communist regime, who harbors an unspeakable loss. A die-hard atheist and drinker who barrels through life with seismic amounts of anger, she rolls her eyes at Ida's Catholic devotion, but Ida is as innocent of the world as her aunt is cynical and worldly. Reminded that this girl is her sole remaining relative, Wanda takes her on a road trip to find the little that is left of her roots.
The movie quietly points its finger at a society that behaved, in most cases, execrably (with generous help from the Catholic Church) towards Polish Jews, during and after the war. But although it is shot in beautiful, expressive black and white, in the square format of the movies of the time, things are not so black and white in this story: her entire family was killed, but baby Ida was saved by some perverse dispensing of pity. We wonder how such deeply pious people could have been so callous, so murderous towards their Jewish neighbors. They were goaded by centuries of church-sponsored antisemitism, greed and the opportunities of war. Bitter irony stings as the current occupant of Ida's family home makes a bargain with her: he will show her where her family is buried as long as she does not claim her house back. She is a nun, he says, he can trust her. Her aunt Wanda went to fight with the Resistance and came back to find that her entire family was wiped out, not by the Nazis, but by the next door neighbors. This is the j'accuse of the film.

By concentrating in the story of one family, long after the war, the film presents its indictment of the collaboration of the Polish citizenry in genocide from a personal and intimate point of view, and this is what makes it emotionally powerful. We do not recoil and distance ourselves from scenes of violence and atrocity, instead, we are vulnerable to Wanda's and Ida's tragic discoveries. Ida devastates because it concentrates on the choices people make under extraordinary circumstances. In the aftermath, everybody has to live with what they did: the Poles deal with the past by generally pretending they knew nothing and remember nothing. Wanda becomes a sort of avenger. In the figure of Ida, an unlikely survivor, yet not really a survivor, since all Jewishness has been erased from her, the film asks for acknowledgment of the citizens' complicity in murder. Meanwhile, the film shows what little remnants there are left of a once vibrant community: old photographs, a forlorn Jewish cemetery in disrepair.

Ida also provides an interesting contrast in characters between the reticent, modest novice a and her world-weary, provocative aunt. In terms of experiences, Ida is almost a blank slate, while Wanda wears decades of rage, fighting and grief in her every gesture. Both actresses are phenomenal, in particular Kulesza. Wanda likes to chain smoke, sleep around and drink, and goads Ida to give life a try. She is merciless in her pursuit of the murderers, but once they get to the family grave in the woods, her anger gives way to grief and she loses her bearings.

As she finds out the truth, Ida must make a choice. After discovering, in the space of a very short time, the existence of truly banal evil, as well as the possibility of living freely as a young woman in the world, she decides to live outside of history. The ending is happy or tragic depending on whether you think that joining a convent at a young age is a good thing or a living death. At least from a Jewish point of view, Ida's reaffirmation of her Catholicism deepens the scope of the tragedy. There will be no trace left of her family at all. 

We don't know if Ida decides to recuse herself from the world because she has found it tainted with horror, or because she expects to glow in purity and religious devotion, or to somehow honor the disappearance of her family by disappearing from the world. She's smart enough to get a taste of what she will be missing after she takes her vows, but it is not enough to convince her that life in the somber world she has briefly experienced is worth it. Perhaps it is as simple as going back to the only womb she knows, which gave her life but also took her real life away from her.

Nebraska

Alexander Payne is a master at satire that can be brutal yet sympathetic to its characters. Like the great Italian Neorrealists, Payne has come up with a jewel of a movie that makes you laugh and breaks your heart, sometimes at the same time.
Nebraska portrays the epic journey of Woody Grant, a landlocked Midwestern man, (Bruce Dern), in this case, from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska. Woody gets a piece of junk mail informing him that he has won a million dollars and he needs to collect the prize in person. Being a lifelong drunk and in the throes of incipient dementia, he seems to have lost the will to live, but he is suddenly energized by the task, and no force on Earth, not his long suffering son David, (Will Forte) or his exasperated wife (June Squibb) will discourage him. We first see him walking purposefully along an interstate, creaking with age and will power. He can't drive, because he has a suspended license. If you can't drive in these parts, you might as well be dead.
Bruce Dern gives a performance so immense and so subtle, that some people may think he is not doing anything. It's all in his eyes. Sometimes they are vacant, lost who knows where, but then he focuses and it's as if his mind is suddenly engaged and back on Earth. He doesn't speak much. At times he may remind you of a dog whose face lights up when he understands a command; sometimes you wonder if he is conveniently pretending to be deaf, especially around his wife. There is not one shred of artifice or exaggeration, not one false note in Dern's acting: it is miraculous. He most deservedly won the best actor prize at Cannes and hopefully he will be a front runner at the Academy Awards. It would be righteous for Dern to cap his career with this long deserved honor. He has always been a spectacular actor, but this is a role you never thought you'd see him in. He breaks your heart.
Nebraska is the saddest comedy you've ever seen. It's a family story, and not a happy one. In the bleak Midwestern nothingness, which Payne and his cinematographer, Phedon Papamichael, shoot in lucid black and white, these people stick to each other even though they seem to have lost their love long ago. Woody's wife Kate is a bundle of vicious resentment and a repository of quaint Midwestern insults. She is so bitter, she's the kind of person who badmouths people at their graves. She is hateful, until the filmmakers give her a moment of grace that portrays her in a whole new light. The film is full of such surprises. As in life, we learn along the way that people are not what they seem, and that their histories contain chapters we know nothing about. As David and Woody travel through the almost surreal emptiness, revisiting people and places of the past, David learns much about his father.
This is a movie about enduring love in both senses of the word: enduring in that it lasts, and enduring in that it takes much sacrifice to withstand it. It is about the kind of love that remains, dulled and almost vanquished by disappointment, regret and failure, but somehow still throbs in there. It takes one crazy notion by a seemingly crazy old guy, to make it start beating again.
But Nebraska is more than a family road trip. Payne is a poet of the Midwest; since he grew up in Omaha, he knows what he's talking about. In the heartland, not far beneath the down home politeness, there is a hard streak in people. As the story spreads that Woody has made a bundle, the greedy come out of the woodwork. Some sweet people who are genuinely happy for him, but there are those with long forgotten grudges, and they want to collect. All sorts of claims come out. Who do you believe? Woody was a difficult man, but his greatest mistake was that he could not say no to anybody. And now, at the end of his life, he is paying the price of his guile and lack of ambition; sins in this country.  
Nebraska is as much a movie about the cruelty of American greed, call it individualism or unbridled capitalism, as it is about fathers and sons and long forgotten personal histories.
This is Alexander Payne's most mature and magnificent film. It has a grander stature, deeper emotions, and its tone, aided by beautiful music by Mark Orton, is perfect.
So far, my favorite film of the year.

Much Ado About Nothing

This lovely adaptation by Joss Whedon of the comedy by William Shakespeare is breezy and charming and has a playful, sexy spirit. An unusual movie for the director of monster blockbusters like The Avengers, and creator of TV shows like Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, it's everything his bigger projects are not. In fact, it's everything most American movies are not. In elegant, if provocative, black and white, with mostly unknown (by me) television actors, unabashedly sexy (a true rarity) and featuring Shakespeare's unadulterated words. Mr. Whedon is some sort of freak.
He made this movie in his house in twelve days, while he was waiting to start post-production on The Avengers, (the third highest grossing movie of all time), feeling lost in the impotence of creating gazillion-dollar spectacles over which he paradoxically feels he has little control.
Without interference from studio blockheads and with his own money, he has made a delightful movie, with total command of tone and spirit. Choosing to transplant the Italian town of Messina to sunny, Mediterranean-looking Santa Monica, he liberates Shakespeare from the stuffiness of costume drama, moats and castles. As Shakespeare adaptations go, this the most laid back I've ever seen. The classy black and white cinematography by Jay Hunter makes it sexy and sophisticated, as leisurely as a luxury car commercial (this is a good thing). His uniformly good cast (with a special nod to the excellent Amy Acker) speak the lines as colloquially as possible, without sounding like Valley girls. In order to help those of us who don't always get Shakespeare's iambic drift, he resorts to good visual ideas and many welcome screwball moments. He has fun bringing Shakespeare up to date, where music comes from iPods, people get text messages announcing the arrival of some duke or another, and the meanies smoke pot. It really works.
The comedy itself is the usual Shakespearean romp. I won't give you the Cliff Notes, but two ornery antagonists, Beatrice and Benedict, set in their ways, impossible to woo and marry, are tricked to fall for each other. Meanwhile, Beatrice's cousin Hero is supposed to wed Claudio, but some bastard sibling of this noble family decides to ruin the wedding, as far as I understood, out of sheer malevolent spite. Whedon understands that there are real heartbreaking consequences in a bride's dishonor and when the play gets dark, he lets the pain really sting. Perhaps in our present time of Kardashian-style hos we don't easily understand that casting doubt on a bride's honor was truly tragic in Shakespeare's day. Hero would have tarnished the family name and she would have been untouchable, probably sent off to fester in a convent for the rest of her life. So the tears that flow are right. Same goes for Beatrice's deep frustration at being a woman living under male rules. There is nothing she can do to help her cousin in distress; her outrage at her own female powerlessness is authentic, and still resonant.
So for all of you who are bitterly complaining about how bad Man of Steel is, do like Joss Whedon, take a break from all the blockbuster madness, and give Shakespeare a try.